Siblings claim Mr Lee was misled into thinking family home was already gazetted

SINGAPORE – A day after Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong addressed allegations over 38 Oxley Road, his siblings are accusing him of misleading their late father to believe that the family home was "already gazetted", or that gazetting it was "inevitable".

Writing on Facebook on Tuesday (July 4), Mr Lee Hsien Yang, 60, and Dr Lee Wei Ling, 62, said that PM Lee made "convoluted, but ultimately false, claims" in his Ministerial Statement in Parliament on the late Mr Lee Kuan Yew's wishes with regard to their family home.

They alleged that he is trying to suggest that their father was open to the preservation of the house "just because he signed some renovation plans in early 2012". PM Lee's "improper misrepresentation" to their father started in 2010, they said.

"Besides issues of improper representation and conflicts of interest on the part of (PM Lee), this shows that (Mr Lee Kuan Yew's) 'consideration' of 'alternatives' to demolition was entirely due to (PM Lee's) representations about the house's fate," they wrote.

On Monday, PM Lee delivered a Ministerial Statement in Parliament, saying that no one in the family had raised objections to the plan approved by Mr Lee Kuan Yew before his death, which involved renovating the private spaces in the house without tearing it down.

It was only after his death that Mr Lee Hsien Yang had, for the first time, voiced his disagreement with the proposal - and it came as a "complete surprise" to him, the PM said.

He added that Mr Lee Kuan Yew had "met the architect, went through the proposal, and approved the scheme to reinforce the foundations and renovate the house". "We kept the family fully informed of our considerations and intentions. We emailed everyone, including my father, my sister, my brother and his wife. No one raised any objections to the plan."

Mr Lee Kuan Yew signed the authorisation to submit the development application to the Urban Redevelopment Authority on March 28, 2012. The authority approved the application about three weeks later.

For more than two weeks, Mr Lee Hsien Yang and Dr Lee have been engaged in a public spat with PM Lee over the demolition of their family home.

This is tied to the Last Will of their father, Singapore's founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. They also claim that their older brother is abusing his power as PM to stop them from tearing down the house.

To prove the claim that their father was "very sceptical about the renovation plans", the two siblings included snippets of email exchanges between Mr Lee Kuan Yew and them, PM Lee and his wife Ho Ching, as well as lawyer Kwa Kim Li.

They alleged that the discussion on the proposed renovation was "instigated" by PM Lee representing that "the house would be inevitably gazetted (or had already been gazetted)", and not because Mr Lee Kuan Yew "accepted" the preservation works and "left instructions for what to do".

The pair also rebutted that PM Lee was trying "to play with words": "Leaving instructions for how to deal with a bad event doesn't imply that you accept or desire the bad event. Suppose someone leaves instructions saying, 'I don't want my books to catch fire. But if my books do catch fire, please call my insurance company.' That does not mean that he 'accepts' that his books will catch fire? Obviously, it is not an excuse to burn his books."

They included an email exchange on April 12, 2015, in which they claimed PM Lee accepted that any discussion on renovation and preservation was "only planning for the regrettable possibility that the house might not be demolished".